MS2

The company that saved me from Sun was MS2, a startup selling a product called “Accelerate” that provided what they called “Product Life Cycle Automation.” 

 

I first interviewed with MS2 almost six months before I actually joined.  In the middle of the interview process I broke my elbow, requiring surgery and extensive physical therapy to recover.  Although they made me an offer, I decided I didn’t want to change jobs at the same time that I was recovering from this injury.

 

As my arm got better, Sun’s fortunes—and thus its morale—got worse.  So in 2000, I called my contact for MS2 to ask if they were still interested in hiring me.  By that point they too were experiencing the effects of the dot-com crash and had a hiring freeze.  They were nevertheless interested in hiring me and made me an offer, which I accepted.

 

At Sun, Tandem before that, and ITEL before that I had been working for computer makers.  Even my relatively brief last stay at Bank of America was doing system programming—making modifications to an IBM operating system.  But at MS2 I was doing application programming, as I had done in the early days of my career.  That early experience had led me to believe that application programming was easy, not very challenging, and therefore not very much fun.  MS2’s application, however, was complex and interesting.  Even more challenging—and rewarding—was their high standards of personal responsibility and accountability.  And the management and staff of MS2 worked with an energy, enthusiasm, and spirit of fun that made the company a joy.  They did push me harder than other companies had, but when I lived up to their expectations—which I believe I generally but not always did—then the satisfaction was correspondingly great. 

 

The physical environment at MS2 as quite different from what I was used to:  we were all in a big room with cubicle and dividers.  This was similar to what I had seen at Calma, but I had since gotten used to 2-person or individual offices at Tandem and Sun.  I expected that the open environment would be distracting—and sometimes it was.  But I found that I could play music through headphones and block out a lot of distractions.  There was one guy who played music through speakers, but somehow he always played the kind of music I like so I didn’t mind. 

 

As for equipment, it was similar to my last job at Tandem:  I had an NT workstation on my desk that I used for both compiling and testing the code I was working on.  I could connect to MS2 over a PVN (Private Virtual Network) using the Internet, so I could easily work from home.  As at Tandem, I used PC Anywhere to access my work computer from home.

 

It was while I was at MS2 that a band of Arab terrorists hijacked several commercial airplanes and flew them into the New York World Trade Center, and the Pentagon in Washington.  I remember coming to work that morning, September 11, 2001, and having co-workers tell me what had happened.  I remember one marketing guy breaking down and crying as we discussed the news.  And I remember the elation of a young technical writer when she learned that her friend, who worked in the World Trade Center, had been late to work that day, probably sparing her life.  This brazen and unexpected attack sent shockwaves through the American people that has caused negative political, cultural, and economic repercussions from which we still haven’t fully recovered.  The immediate effect on the economy was to significantly deepen and worsen the slow-down in the purchase of new hardware and software that had been started by the dot-com crash.  In fact the entire U.S. economy went into a recession—but Silicon Valley was probably the hardest hit portion of the country. 

 

 Other the next few years, thousands of programmers in Silicon Valley were thrown out of work, as startups failed, established companies retrenched, and no funding could be found for new startups. 

 

MS2 was somewhat successful in avoiding the hazards of the dot-com crash; in fact they refocused their products to help companies struggling with the economy.  But the added blow of September 11 was too much.  The company stopped getting new sales, and eventually went under.

 

I survived the first two rounds of layoffs at MS2, but not the third.  For the first time in my career, I was out of work.  I went back to visit several times after that, and the joy and excitement had been knocked out of the company.  The forth round was the last:  everyone was let go and the company basically gave away its product to a competitor in return for a promise that the acquiring company would support the MS2 customers long enough to transition them to competitor’s product.

 

MS2 was the second company I had worked for that had failed.  (The first was ITEL.)  Of the two, MS2 was certainly the more painful for me.  The small size of the company, and the sense of camaraderie was something to be missed.  Even to this day we still get together occasionally for drinks or dinner.  Moreover, when I was laid off from ITEL, I already had another job lined up—Silicon Valley was still booming in those days.  When I was laid off from MS2, there were no jobs to be found.  I was out of work for slightly over a year.

 

During the time I was off work I used my time to look up old friends, and to learn a new Microsoft technology:  .NET.